PBS’s extraordinary six-hour documentary God in America is a dense,
information-packed production spanning 400 years of the New World’s efforts
to create its own brands of religion.

God in America, a co-production of the award winning shows American Experience and FRONTLINE, takes viewers from the mid-1600s to present times in explaining how Americans have always demanded and consequently developed their owns brands of religion and spirituality.

In a New World, religion would have a new face or more accurately, many new faces. Set against the gorgeous vistas of northern New Mexico, God in America opens with the first major struggle against state-enforced religion by the Spanish conquistadors and their priests.

In the mid-1660s, after 10 years of dealing with the Spanish Empire’s presence in North America, the Pueblo Indians became wary of the more than 40 Catholic churches that had been built on their land. The Indian “conversions” the priests so proudly reported were no more than polite observations or add-ons to the Pueblos who had been guided by their own spiritual traditions for more than 1000 years.

And when 45 of their leaders were jailed in Santa Fe as sorcerers, followed by the hanging of three and the public flogging of one, they decided to act. The 1680 Pueblo revolt left one-half of the priests murdered and within 10 days the Spaniards had fled.

Back in the eastern colony of Massachusetts, where Puritans sought to "purify" the Anglican Church, renegade Anne Hutchinson refused to accept the edicts of social conformity handed down by powerful Governor Winthrop. Even though she and her family were banished from the colony, her ideas about a one-to-one relationship with God that required no intermediaries or rituals were spreading like wildfire.

In 1740, Oxford student George Whitfield hit America’s preaching circuit with his rebirthing philosophy that would become known among Protestants as being born again. Protestant denominations flourished in America and Thomas Jefferson’s influence brought about the First Amendment to the US Constitution which abolished preferential government funding for any religion, now referred to as the separation of church and state.

In America, the individual’s power over his or her own religious experience signaled the end of the old aristocratic order and the rise of the voice of conscience against the state.

Using dramatic re-enactments, interviews with prominent religion scholars, documentary footage, and photographs, God in America goes on to look at how religious belief shaped the origins of the Civil War and President Abraham Lincoln’s actions. Later on, Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise advocated a new reform Judaism that adopted ancient traditions to modern American culture. The battle over modernity peaked in the 1925 trial of John Scopes, a Dayton, Tennessee teacher arrested for teaching evolution.

In the post-war era, at the same time the Supreme Court handed down controversial decisions that required government actions to have secular purposes, new religious energy fueled the Cold War fight against “Godless Communism” and energised the Civil Rights movement.

The series ends with an exploration of the political aspirations of the religious right and the re-emergence of a religious voice in the Democratic Party.

God in America is a meticulous, thoughtful, and provocative production. It is a must-see for anyone who wants to understand the motivations and actions behind America’s relentless quest for religious freedom that began almost 400 years ago.